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Loading... Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locustby Nathanael West
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. mrtall | Jun 1, 2009 |   5 stars for Miss Lonelyhearts + 3.5 starts for Day of the Locust equal 8.5 stars: divided by 2, which comes to 4.25 stars; round down to the nearest whole number (if the number is even) and you get 4 stars. Add 0.5 stars for being the basis of a 4 star movie "Miss Lonelyhearts" and subtract 1 star for being the basis of a 2 star movie "The Day of the Locust" and you get 3.5 stars. Round up to the nearest even whole number and again you get 4 stars. (  )jburlinson | Dec 26, 2008 | Of these two novellas, Miss Lonelyhearts was by far my favorite. "Miss Lonelyhearts" is actually a male employee of a New York newspaper who write the advice column much in the vein of Ann Landers. He initially treats his job as a huge joke, but day after day of letters dealing with horribly depressing issues, he kinda cracks and becomes extremely disillusioned with humanity. The bulk of the story is Miss Lonelyhearts trying to free himself from depression through art, alcohol, sex, and finally religion. That's all I'll say...other than the ending is a bit like if Flannery O'Connor set one of her stories in New York city rather than the South...highly recommended short read. Day of the Locust is fine. It gets mentioned a lot for being a book that epitomizes Hollywood and all of the absurdity of Southern California during the Golden Age of Films. I enjoyed it, but the story does come off a bit like a convoluted soap opera at times, which I guess is fitting. (  )araridan | Apr 6, 2008 | It's been a long while since I've read anything so distinctly American. Miss Lonelyhearts is heavy-handed and obviously symbolic. The piece is a bit too concentrated, and lacks the finesse of America's more skilled symbolists. It's just clumsy and too easy. The urban/rural contrast along with the overt religious symbolism makes Miss Lonelyhearts a quick and easy read, but unfulfilling. The Day of the Locust is a little more subtle, but does little to keep the reader actively engaged. You feel little toward characters (except for maybe Faye, who you'll probably loathe) and while the novella's climax and denouement are rewarding and engaging, the journey there is a bit flat. (  )rosencrantz | Jul 7, 2007 | Two works of fiction which depict West's nightmare vision of Los Angeles pre-1940, which has, oddly, almost completely come true but is no longer considered a nightmare-- it's just LA. (  )abirdman | Jul 4, 2007 | 1  0.939 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0811202151, Paperback)"Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' " observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. "My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published." Yet today, West is widely recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision ofa society obsessed with mass- produced fantasies foretold much of what was to come in American life. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned as "a novel in the form of a comic strip," tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of his readers. The Day of the Locust (1939) is West's great dystopian Hollywood novel based on his experiences at the seedy fringes of the movie industry. "The work of Nathanael West, savagely, comically, tragically original, has come into its own," said novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg. "A new public [has] discovered in the writings of West a brilliant reflection of its own sense of chaos and helplessness in a world running more to madness than to reason." (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Miss Lonelyhearts is an odd and haunting story: the eponymous protatgonist is actually a young man who's fallen into the job of writing an agony aunt column for a newspaper. We see him displayed in a number of set pieces, reacting to the ubiquity of evil and misery in the world. He's also Christ-haunted, in a very Flannery O'Connor-esque way, with some similarly bizarre behavioral results. This novella is sharply-written and memorably disturbing.
The Day of Locust is one of the foundational Hollywood novels, featuring a young studio artist's experiences as he sketches, both literally and figuratively, the brutal outlines of the real characters that inhabit Lala Land. Some of these lost souls are unforgettable, and as the story reaches a feverish climax, we are left wondering if there's any hope at all for the great mass of us.
Recommended, for the power of West's writing, and for these works' hard-edged portrayal of the 1930s, and of the unchanging depths of human nature itself. (